

C. Sivasankaran: the price warrior who failed to price in his own risks
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.In the mid-1980s, when a personal computer in India cost as much as ₹80,000, a young Tamil entrepreneur walked into the stalled market and crashed prices by more than half.Chinnakannan Sivasankaran, known simply as Siva, had just bought Sterling Computers from Robert Amritraj, father of tennis star Vijay Amritraj. His opening move was to launch the Siva PC at ₹33,000 with the tagline “The Power of Siva.”The market responded immediately as rivals were forced to cut prices.
From a mere 1,200 PCs sold across India in 1985, sales climbed to over 50,000 by 1989. Sterling rocketed into India's top three computer companies, and Siva, barely thirty, announced himself as a dangerous disruptor and a wily competitor.Born on 29 July 1956, in Tamil Nadu, Sivasankaran grew up with few advantages beyond ambition.
He began as a fabrication contractor for Madras Refineries Limited (now Chennai Petroleum Corporation Limited), a grease-stained start far removed from the presidential suites he would later inhabit.In person, Siva was a bundle of energy — shifting effortlessly between Tamil and boardroom English, sporting gold Rolexes and Montblanc pens without affectation.The early PC success was only the beginning. By the 1990s, Sterling had been wound down, Siva refusing to wait for the fate that befell dozens of PC makers in an increasingly commoditized market.In 1992, he secured a five-year Yellow Pages contract from MTNL — a quiet beachhead into telecom.
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